A Unique Dual Education: Editor’s Introduction and Personal Commentary (article)

People interested in psychohistory have sometimes asked me about the proper training to effectively combine psychology with traditional academic disciplines. My answer is that there is no one way to become a good psychohistorian, but that a personal analysis is both the starting point and the most important ingredient. The Socratic dictum, “Know thyself,” holds true even more today than it did over 2,300 years ago when it was first uttered. The development of modern psychoanalysis gives us a method of putting an invaluable utterance into practice.

As someone who took his doctoral degree in history in the 1960s and began ten years of training in psychoanalysis in 1973, I had long wanted to devote an issue of this publication to dual training and its impact on historians and other scholars. As a result, I was pleased by several recent occurrences: first, Peter Loewenberg’s call in Fantasy and Reality in History for “a dual discipline and dual career”; next, the comments of Bruce Mazlish in our December issue of Clio’s Psyche, worrying about its impact on historians; and, finally, Charles Strozier’s frank discussion of his dual training in our March issue. Consequently, I asked certain scholars who have been trained in psychoanalysis or one of the psychotherapies to relate their experiences and to explain its impact on their work.

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My request was for a short, personalized essay, answering, where possible, the following questions: Why did you choose to train in psychoanalysis after, or while earning, a doctoral degree? What was the training like? What parts of it (course work, case presentation, case supervision, the training/personal analysis) were most helpful and in what ways? How did the clinical elements affect your assessment of human motivation? How was it different from and/or the same as your academic training? Did the training affect your work in your discipline and, if so, how? Did you publish more or less as a result of this training? How was what you published different as a result? Was any teaching and or administration you did changed by the experience? If so, in what ways?

For those who had clinical experience, I also suggested the following questions: How were you received, given your unusual background for a clinician, by clients/patients, therapists, insurers, and the general public? How did your clinical work help or hurt an academic/professional career and in what ways? Overall, was it an asset or liability in your career? (In making this assessment, I asked the authors to include the affects of the greater insight and effectiveness they may have gotten in the course of psychoanalytic training.) What were the comparative rewards, demands, pleasures, and frustrations of your two fields?

The first step was to identify and invite potential contributors. It should be noted that virtually all psychoanalysts have dual training, since one or more graduate degrees are required for entry into psychoanalytic programs. To start with, I asked people I had met or heard of during my 20 years of psychohistorical organizing. Next, Peter Loewenberg of the UCLA History Department and the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society, was generous enough to lend his name to the enterprise, write the introduction, recommend a group of potential contributors, and answer my questions about dual training and research psychoanalysts in Los Angeles. Finally, I went through the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis’ 1997 National Registry of Psychoanalysts so I could identify and write individuals with dual training which included history.

The response to the call for papers was both gratifying and frustrating. Gratifying that a number of people were able to take time from extremely busy schedules to write about their thoughts and experiences regarding dual training. Frustrating that I had made the wrong assumption about how much lead time and space were needed for this type of project. Clearly, six months to a year was a more appropriate time to give our participants as opposed to the one to three months that we in fact did give. Scholars like Peter Gay have so many activities and commitments on their plate that the time allotted was simply insufficient. Nevertheless, a number of people from the busy and creative group who have had a rather unique education did find the time and wrote within the limited space that we were able to allot. Because psychohistory is such an interdisciplinary field, we also decided to open the issue to individuals whose scholarly training was in fields other than history. It is no accident that three of our papers are by individuals with training in literature since an enormous number of people in that field have profound psychodynamic interests and a number have undergone psychoanalytic training. Had we time enough, I believe that we could have had a representative with dual training from each major field represented in academia. In fact the disciplines represented in this special issue are history, literature, political science, psychology, and sociology.

A major goal of this issue is to demystify some of the elements of psychoanalytic training. This postgraduate training is available to mature individuals who are deemed to have the emotional, intellectual, and therapeutic potential. With a growing number of exceptions, such as with the relationship of the Psychoanalytic Institute of Los Angeles and the UCLA History Department, it is conducted by psychoanalytic institutes which are not directly affiliated with colleges and universities. Later, I will discuss the cooperative movement between academia and psychoanalytic institutes.

The essence of the training is a personal psychoanalysis (the “training analysis”), courses in the theory and practice of psychoanalysis, and the supervised treatment of patients over many years. Though the courses are scheduled to last a set number of years, five at many institutes, the education is open-ended: it is more a matter of minimal standards than a sum total of earned credits. It normally concludes with a lengthy paper on a psychoanalytic case that has been seen for a number of years and an oral defense of this case. This case presentation is parallel to the oral

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defense stage of the dissertation in doctoral work. An examination of these two forms of education is instructive.

Both forms of education require an enormous commitment of time, money, intelligence, and energy. In analytic training, as in graduate school, first the student does the course work and then focuses on a individual project: in the one case researching and writing a dissertation and in the other treating and writing about a psychoanalytic patient. In both cases the classes are usually small and the education is personalized. In either form of education, most students do not incline to complete their education in a set number of years, with the result that many drop out, though at institutes additional seminars sometimes are added to keep the students from becoming demoralized. Both forms of education put enormous pressure on the student (called a “psychoanalytic candidate” at the institutes), especially since so much must be done on his/her own. In both forms of education the students tend to feel quite exposed to the criticism of their instructors, especially since issues of personality are so relevant to the work psychoanalytic candidates are being trained to do. However, in the final analysis, the graduate school analogy is totally inadequate.

Psychoanalytic training is closer to the model of a professional school of medicine or law than it is to that of graduate school in the liberal arts and social sciences: primarily it is the skill of helping patients which is being taught. In my view, it is most like being an artist going to work with a series of master artists who supervise your work on a weekly basis. The masters recognize that the journeymen/women need theory courses, but that these courses are quite secondary to the practical experience of honing their art. Psychoanalytic training, at least for me, involved a much greater sense of self-discovery and empowerment than did earning my doctoral degree. As a result of it, I felt I had invaluable tools for exploring the world and myself, and I felt much more in control of my life. Some of my fellow psychoanalytic candidates who were already exposed to personal psychoanalysis and patients prior to the training and who lacked my intellectual impetus to apply psychoanalysis to society and history seem to have found it to be much less stimulating. They were learning a valuable skill that helped people, usually improved their own livelihood, and typically enabled them to give up an institutional job in favor of private practice. As a psychohistorical networker and organizer, I soon discovered that most analysts simply did not share my interests, even if they were open to the language of the unconscious. Let me now turn to my personal experience in psychoanalytic training.

Psychoanalytic education was for me a wonderful voyage of exploration and self-discovery. Yet I came to it only after working past many misconceptions. For example, in 1972 I thought I had to have an MD in psychiatry or a PhD in psychology to be psychoanalytically trained. Though I realized that there were exceptions for those who were grandfathered into the field, this did not contradict my assumption. By chance, one day I walked to class with a psychologist/psychoanalyst colleague who questioned this assumption. She indicated that there were a number of institutes in the New York area that accepted people who had advanced degrees in the humanities and that I might want to apply to one of these since I was always talking about psychoanalysis and psychohistory.

My intellectual reason for considering psychoanalytic training was that I felt it would be invaluable to me in order to think psychohistorically. I had looked up the word “transference” in every possible source and I could never understand the definitions — and I realized I never would until I had experienced transference. But an intellectual reason for going into training was insufficient. I came to realize that I both wanted and could personally benefit from psychoanalysis. At the time my first marriage was floundering and I was having to confront the glaring difference between my idealized image of academia and the real academic world. This was not an easy step to take since I came from a family which believed therapy was for the hopelessly insane or the idle rich, certainly not for the son of immigrant parents. Yet, intellectual reasons, combined with problems in love and work, were enough for me to overcome my resistances to entering analysis.

In short order, I was accepted to both the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis (NPAP) and the New Jersey Institute for Training in Psychoanalysis. I began by auditing a class and a case presentation seminar at the NPAP but soon switched to the New Jersey Institute which was more conveniently located. At the beginning of training I thought the intellectual component was what really counted, but I soon

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realized that the experiential components were far more important. Thus I came to value my own psychoanalysis, case presentation seminars, and control analyses as far more valuable than my courses on abstract theory. The best theoretical constructs were taught in the context of extensive clinical examples. It totally amazed me how in a case presentation seminar, there could be a half dozen different interpretations, each shedding new light on the subject as well as on the psychoanalytic candidate making the interpretation. I found that brilliant theoretical interpretations were usually wrong and was pleased to read Thomas Kohut describe the same observation during his training in Cincinnati. In my experience, the best therapists in training tended to be the best listeners.

If therapists who relied on abstract theory were missing the point, were psychohistorians with a heavy reliance on theory often in the same situation? I would say yes, based upon my observations of numerous psychohistorians with whom I have worked closely in the development of their ideas, and in my personal experience. Though I was sometimes drawn to certain theoretical formulations, in graduate school, like most history students and faculty, I found I had a distrust of theory. In psychoanalytic training I continued to distrust theory, though, as in graduate school, I also felt I had to have an excellent theoretical and working knowledge of all the theories that my fellow candidates or instructors talked about. It is worth noting that the candidates, in their insecurity, were far more concerned about theoretical issues than were our teachers.

There were six people in my class at the New Jersey Institute and for several courses over a five-year period this class would meet with another of a similar size. My classmates were three social workers, some with enormous clinical experience; an equally experienced psychiatric nurse; and a literature professor. The other professor and I would shine when dealing with the intellectual component of our training but we initially felt bewildered and inadequate when it came to the discussion of patients.

As Victor Wolfenstein notes, it can be hard for professional teachers to sit through long classes. First, they are used to being the instructor, rather than the student. Second, the instructors at psychoanalytic institutes are usually unpaid, non-professional teachers of uneven teaching experience and quality.

When my classmates and I started asking about when we would see patients at the Psychoanalytic Clinic (aka the Low Cost Clinic), a summer placement was worked out whereby we would see both resident and outpatients at Rockland Psychiatric Hospital for the summer and an institute faculty member would supervise us. Dealing with institutionalized patients was a revelation in itself and I remain grateful to the kindness of the staff and patients. Since we were total clinical novices, I remain convinced that the patients helped us more than my colleague and I could possibly help them. After my intensive summer immersion was over, I spent one day a week for another six months at the hospital and two of the patients I had seen there chose to see me at the Institute’s Clinic. Today, however, clinically inexperienced candidates at the Institute are sent to a volunteer counseling service which accepts mostly people who are college graduates and appear to be emotionally stable.

My training analysis was from one to five times a week, though primarily twice a week. Eventually there was invaluable group therapy with my analyst. Most, but not all the time, I used the couch. My course on dreams was intellectualized and therefore disappointing. However, attending and then running experiential dream group seminars was an invaluable tool in probing unconscious processes. Seeing patients as a therapist in training, helped to deepen my own analysis because I had to confront my own feelings induced by the needs of my patients (the induced countertransference). From personal referrals as well as those at the Clinic, I built up a private practice of about 30 patient hours per week. This left insufficient time for other activities and I eventually cut it down so that it would not be over ten hours per week. Until the creation of Clio’s Psyche this allowed adequate time for teaching, research, psychohistorical organizing, and publication. My private practice also provided the funds to pay for research and scholarly publication expenses.

Psychoanalytic training textbooks such as those by Otto Fenichel, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (NY: W.W. Norton and Co., 1945); Ralph Greenson, The Technique and Practice of Psychoanalysis (NY: International Universities Press, 1967); and Charles Brenner, An Elementary Textbook of Psychoanalysis (NY: International Universities Press, 1955), are useful and even essential, but quite secondary to the following: the

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ability to listen for what the patient does not realize is being communicated; knowing when, and when not, to interpret; knowing how to make the right interpretation; knowing how to use one’s own feelings in treatment; and empathy. It is noteworthy that five of the six historians in this issue referred to empathy, while few historians without psychoanalytic influences use the term in print.

The training analysis is the key ingredient in psychoanalytic training. When it comes to decisions involving their analysands, in both talking and writing reports for the institute, psychoanalysts follow the rule of abstinence: they may not participate in any decisions involving their analysand because that might weaken the therapeutic alliance and therefore inhibit what the psychoanalytic candidate would express. The sense of emotional exposure can be difficult for psychoanalytical candidates who are on unchartered voyages of self-discovery. However, they are not alone because they have an ally or two in their analyst and control analyst who can help them validate their experience and think of protecting themselves from unnecessary exposure.

My recommendation is that it may be a good thing to avoid going into analysis with someone who has a leadership role in a training institute because it confuses the transference. This may be easier said than done because institutes are small organizations, and analyst and analysand may find themselves in the same class, lecture hall, committee room, or even holiday party.

Despite the invitation to write about one’s “training/personal analysis,” writing about one’s own psychoanalysis is not something that most of our authors chose to do in the limited space provided. Victor Wolfenstein appreciatively mentions his psychoanalyst by name while Lloyd deMause refers to his unusually long analysis of 27 years. Two authors, including the one who has not been analyzed, mention their own depressive tendencies.

What constitutes psychoanalysis is a question which may arise in the minds of the reader and one with which analysts and accrediting organizations struggle. Most analysts, though not Adlerians, use the couch, though not necessarily for all patients. The frequency of treatment is often raised as a criterion and is quite variable. The standard for NPAP in New York City is three times a week and for Jungians it is once a week. The definition of psychoanalysis on page iv of the National Registry of Psychoanalysts is quite general. It avoids specifics involving frequency and the physical position of the analysand, more appropriately focusing on the “intense verbal, therapeutic relationship between the analyst and the analysand” as well as “the resistances, defenses, transference, countertransference phenomena” and so forth.

Occasionally, I have been asked if all psychohistorians must be analyzed and get analytic training. Andrew Brink provides an excellent example of a psychohistorian who does fine research and writing on creativity and psychobiography without having had psychoanalysis or psychoanalytic training. He received on-the-job training in psychotherapy for ten years as an Associate Member of the Department of Psychiatry at McMaster University and then for a few months as a psychotherapist at the Affective Disorders Centre before leaving to head a University of Toronto program combining psychoanalysis with the humanities. These therapeutic opportunities were open to him because he was well respected by the people running the programs. Without his asking directly, they invited him in while turning away others who eagerly sought entry. Yet, as his article indicates, this modest man is painfully aware of the personal and professional limits imposed by his lack of psychoanalysis and dual training. Rudolph Binion and George Kren are two other fine scholars who have made significant contributions to our field without undergoing psychoanalysis or psychoanalytic training. The one other author without psychoanalytic training per se is Todd Schultz. He was asked to write for this issue in order to provide an example of a psychology doctoral student who had to struggle to focus on psychobiography and psychohistory in a non-clinical program which emphasized experimental research.

In the introduction of Cultural Theory and Psychoanalytic Tradition (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1991), there is an excellent discussion of the psychoanalytic training of David James Fisher — a historian and member of the Psychohistory Forum. One of many interesting points he makes is about “psychoanalytic time, which is slow, laborious, needlessly bureaucratic, and not particularly attuned to the desires and anxieties of the novice.” He also discusses, as does Thomas Kohut, the “power of transference to a school of thought or method of inquiry.” For

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Fisher it was the difference between Kleinians and classical psychoanalysts; at my institute it was the difference between advocates of Kernberg and Kohut.

Do psychoanalytically-trained historians publish less than their classmates in graduate school as Professor Mazlish fears? Do the demands of their practice cause them to lose interest in publishing? Do they publish very different materials than they would have without the training? The answers to these complex questions are not usually, sometimes, and yes. Let me explain after discussing rates of publication.

Most psychoanalytically-inclined historians I know publish only a modest amount, but most other historians of my acquaintance publish far less. Many decades ago my doctoral adviser did a study of the publication activities of historians. This distinguished scholar, who went on to edit the American Historical Review and become acting president of Rutgers University and president of the University of Cincinnati, discovered that only one out of four historians actually published anything after completing his/her doctoral dissertation.

Four of our respondents indicated that they may have published less or later in their careers as a result of their dual training. Jonathan Goldberg, a literature professor-turned-psychoanalyst, who eagerly welcomed my invitation to contribute to our issue, wrote that as a practicing analyst he simply did not have the time to publish. I, on the contrary, recount that it was psychohistory which motivated me to publish. David James Fisher is an example of a historian making his living as a psychoanalyst who publishes high quality scholarly materials, but who needs lots of lead time because of the demands of his practice. Thus, he was not able to contribute specifically to our issue in the time allotted. Everyone who touches on the point agrees that psychoanalytically-trained scholars are inclined to publish different materials than they would have without their dual training. At best their writings provide a creativity, depth and humanity not normally possible without the special insights of psychoanalysis as well as a unique integration of thought and emotion.

Ultimately, I think psychoanalytically-trained historians and other scholars have more to say as we develop the paradigm of psychohistory which leads us to write and publish quite a lot. This is certainly the case with me. After a successful, but demoralizing defense of my doctoral dissertation on the controversy regarding the condition of the workers in the English Industrial Revolution, I thought I had to publish to be a historian. But what could I publish? I approached a publishing company about putting together a book of documents of the English Industrial Revolution and they were eager to publish it. Feeling more obligated than enthusiastic, I started work on it — but it was just plain dull compared to the psychoanalytic and psychohistorical materials I was exploring at the time. At Temple University in 1971, I perished rather than published as was the case with the overwhelming majority of the other young historians with whom I was hired to do the survey teaching in a department with 83 historians. At the time I denigrated publishing as one of the least important parts of a professor’s job and searched for a small college where there was more concern for students than for publication.

At Ramapo College I became a founding faculty member and did not publish anything until a year after I was awarded tenure in 1976. At the present time, I publish far more than most full professors at the college despite a heavy annual teaching load of 24 credits, plus another 15 credits in summer and winter sessions, and very limited release time for research and writing. My publications are made possible because of my commitment to developing the psychohistorical paradigm and the realization that much of what I write is original. It is worth burning the midnight oil to help to shape a new field. I also learned in my analysis to trust my own feelings, and to not be afraid to write about them. This freed me from some writer’s blocks which had periodically plagued me since the first time I recollect attempting to write as a small boy.

In 1976 I was writing my first publication, “Three Days in Plains,” based on a visit to Jimmy Carter’s hometown about a week before the 1976 election. The article was written, except for the conclusion, and it read well, but I began to feel insecure since it would be criticized as “mere psychohistorical journalism.” I decided I needed a theoretical framework, which came to me as I sat in a course on narcissism and borderline personality. “Jimmy Carter was a narcissistic personality” was my conclusion and I went home and wrote it up. Though I received only compliments on this article, which also became a chapter of a book (Jimmy Carter and American Fantasy, [New York: Two Continents, 1977]), I

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realized in my own psychoanalysis that the labeling was a defensive maneuver on my part. Certainly, Jimmy Carter had lots of narcissism, but so do almost all politicians. At that point I decided to work to write psychohistory with a minimum of theory and I have never regretted the decision despite the difficulty of living up to this standard.

Let me now turn from issues of publication to some more generalizations about our authors and others with dual training. The gender breakdown of our authors, twelve male and only one female, is not representative of the field or of my own experience in training. When I called Margery Quackenbush, Administrator of the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis (NAAP) in New York City, she thought that among this organization of lay analysts there are about 66 percent women and 34 percent men, which was the approximate sex ratio at the New Jersey Institute when I attended it. In this respect, the gender ratio of those who wrote for this issue may be more typical of medical analysts of the American Psychoanalytic Association, who tend to be men, than it is of lay analysts who are not PhD psychologists.

College teaching can become quite arid if it is abstractly intellectualized and if there is no renewed stimulation. The absence of the “subjective factor” lead Jonathan Goldberg to give up college teaching. Others, such as Richard Weiss and Jeffery Prager, report being much more sensitized to subjective factors in their disciplines as a result of training. Most of our authors are, or have been, college teachers and all of them with psychoanalytic training who delved into issues of teaching noted that psychoanalytic training, or psychoanalysis, changed how they saw students and how they taught. For example, Thomas Kohut and Mark Bracher became more aware of transference issues among students. Both describe becoming much more sensitive teachers. Mark Bracher, a literature professor, describes helping certain students resolve “intrapsychic conflicts” which is “essential to helping them become effective writers.” When Kohut describes learning how to “tolerate silence, confusion, even tension in the classroom” without holding forth, it reminds me of my own experience. Psychoanalysis both freed me from older patterns and enabled me to develop different modalities in the classroom such as historical re-enactment (the role-playing of historical figures). Psychoanalysis made me much more sensitive to the needs of individual students, to the importance of mentorship, and to the students’ need for their professors as role models. My model of education changed from what I had been taught in graduate school in history. There I saw it as my job to fill the heads of my students full of historical facts and ideas. During my training I came to want to help the individual students to each find the inquisitive five-year-old within, the curious child who loved to learn. I began to see my job as helping them to overcome their resistances to learning, just as I worked with patients to help them overcome their resistances to self-knowledge.

Scholars come to clinical work for different reasons and have different reactions to the opportunities presented. Lloyd deMause came to clinical work because he wanted to analyze Hitler and his institute wanted him to analyze patients at a time when he was also absorbed in starting a business. As a consequence, he dropped out of training, the continuance of which might have been quite valuable to him as a psychohistorian. Intensive work with individual patients might have tempered some of his psychohistorical generalizations, thereby helping his ideas to gain greater acceptance. Professor J. Lee Shneidman of Adelphi University spent four years at the Columbia University Institute for Psychoanalytic Training Post Graduate Program and two years in psychoanalytic training at Rubin Fine’s institute in New York. He reports that Columbia feared he would see patients while Rubin Fine said he had to do clinical work to remain a psychoanalytic candidate. Since he was not interested in clinical work, he left training. He does not feel training had an impact on his work, though on the basis of working with him on psychohistory for over fifteen years, I rather doubt this view. But I cannot say with any certainty that his psychological awareness does not come from his own analysis, psychoanalyst wife, and numerous friends and colleagues who are therapists. It is worth noting that John Demos, Lloyd deMause, and a variety of other psychohistorians are also married to psychotherapists or psychoanalysts.

Lee Shneidman’s situation of being accepted as a research candidate at Columbia and being restricted from seeing patients was not unique. John Demos and Charles Strozier both had this experience as research candidates at Chicago. In speaking with them the dominant feeling was of gratitude, but I also felt there was some sense of exclusion since they were left out of the core

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function of the Institute — treating patients. Sometime after Strozier came to the Center on Violence and Human Survival in New York City in 1986, he had the opportunity to teach and see patients at the Training and Research Institute for Self Psychology.

One of our authors, Jonathan J. Goldberg, is very pessimistic about the present and future of lay analysts from the liberal arts. In my opinion he overstates his case. Despite his assertion that literature professors can no longer get training in analysis, the institute at which I trained, as do many others, continues to welcome liberal arts professors as students The career of the late Melvin Goldstein, a literature professor and psychohistorian, also serves as evidence of the wide acceptance of lay analysts. For many years Goldstein taught physicians about clinical work — a Sisyphean task in his view — and was accredited by the State of Connecticut as a medical examiner despite his lack of an MD or PhD in psychology. Though the intervention of third-party payers and managed care may hurt the economics of psychoanalysts — most especially for those who come from fields other than medicine, psychology, social work, and nursing — the gates to training seem to me to be open wider than they ever were in the past.

Let us now turn to some questions involving how psychoanalysis fits into the world of academia and health care. Recently, there has been a movement for psychoanalytic institutions to affiliate with universities. For many years there was a relatively small number of psychoanalytic programs that were affiliated with, or a part of, universities. Those at UCLA, New York University, Columbia University, and Adelphi come to mind. Margery Quackenbush of the NAAP has helped make me aware of the proliferation of psychoanalytic affiliations at a time when analytic institutes and universities find it in their self-interest to make connections. For example, Emory and Duke Universities have psychoanalytic educational programs and the Denver Institute for Psychoanalysis is affiliated with the Denver School of Medicine.

The movement for credentialling psychoanalysis takes other forms as well. Dr. Phyllis Meadows has created the free-standing Boston Graduate School which gives a master’s degree in psychoanalysis. For over 20 years I have known psychoanalysts who have signed up for distance learning doctoral programs, and I sat on the doctoral committee of one. These programs allow practicing psychoanalysts, who do not have a PhD or MD, to earn one by working independently and taking courses on site for brief periods in California, the Caribbean, Florida, or elsewhere. Though most traditional academics question the validity of external doctoral degrees earned in this manner, to much of the public, a doctorate is a doctorate. Insurance companies now, but not necessarily 15 or 25 years ago, make sharp distinctions regarding degrees and are almost always inclined to favor short-term therapies over long-term ones. However, some psychoanalysts from untypical backgrounds get around these difficulties by licensure or certification as marriage counsellors or in some other field.

A comparison of psychoanalytically-inclined scholars at and from Yale and UCLA is revealing. At Yale many excellent books have been written by outstanding psychoanalytically-inclined historians and psychiatrists. People such as John Demos, Peter Gay, Kenneth Keniston, and Robert Jay Lifton are a credit to our field. The first two are historians with psychoanalytic training who stopped short of seeing patients. The latter two were psychohistory students of Erik Homberger Erikson at Harvard and, like their classmate Robert Coles, have demonstrated an unusual ability to reach a large audience. To the best of my knowledge, neither of this group has formal psychoanalytic training. Both have moved on to other institutions, with Lifton doing admirable applied psychohistory at the Center for the Study of Violence and Human Survival at CUNY.

At UCLA excellent work has been accomplished by Robert Dallek, Robert Hill, Peter Loewenberg, Mauricio Mazón, Fredelle Spiegel, Richard Weiss, and others, and identifiable psychohistorical institutions have been created which are an integral part of the History Department and the University. An educational alliance was forged between the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute (SCPI) and the UCLA History Department with Samual Eisenstein and Peter Loewenberg playing some of the key leadership roles. Loewenberg and others at the SCPI and the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Institute convinced the California legislature and Governor Jerry Brown to create the category of “research psychoanalyst.” UCLA graduate students from the History Department, who work with certain professors, even have the opportunity to spend part

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of their time at the Psychoanalytic Institute. Faculty from all departments may, and do, train as analysts and may even receive financial support to do this. Graduate students can win training awards. Funding has come from many sources: the Robert J. Stoller Foundation, the Hayman Endowment Fellowships, various other foundations, and a $50 per year voluntary annual assessment of SCPI members. Peter Loewenberg plays a key role in helping to create and enlarge these opportunities as indicated by his helping to establish the University of California Interdisciplinary Psychoanalytic Consortium. A sense of psychoanalytic and psychohistorical community is an important outgrowth of these efforts.

Even UCLA graduate historians who fail to avail themselves of the opportunity for dual training, Professor Geoffrey Cocks for example, are profoundly influenced by the experience as reflected by their scholarship. Nellie Thompson, one of the authors in this issue, trained at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute after graduating from the UCLA doctoral program in history. It is not at all surprising that over half of our authors have had a direct connection to Professor Loewenberg and/or the University of California system.

When I interviewed Peter Gay (Yale–Emeritus) [see interview on page 33], who took psychoanalytic training but chose not to make the enormous commitment of time and energy to see patients, it was my feeling that even in graduate school at Columbia with his classmate Richard Hofstadter he was what I would call a proto-psychohistorian.

But at Yale, the psychohistorical and psychoanalytic climate was not nearly as fertile within the history department as at UCLA. This is not to say that psychoanalysis has not been a powerful force on this Ivy League campus, especially at the Yale Child Studies Center, in the Psychoanalysis and the Humanities seminars, and formerly in the Yale Department of Psychiatry. About two decades ago the Gardiner/Kanzer Seminars (now the Muriel Gardiner Program in Psychoanalysis and the Humanities) were established to encourage discourse between psychoanalysts and the Yale campus. Psychoanalysis in the region is centered at the Western New England Psychoanalytic Institute in New Haven and the Austin-Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts — with strong Eriksonian influence. In the 1960s several faculty received NIMH (National Institute for Mental Health) funding for psychoanalytic training, but the idea of awards or fellowships to support psychoanalytic candidates never was institutionalized, in sharp comparison to the situation at UCLA.

The less friendly attitude towards psychoanalysis in the Yale History Department, compared to the UCLA department, may be part of the reason why Gay chose to get his analytic training late in his career, when his reputation was totally secured. To do this he had to go to a Connecticut psychoanalytic institute with no affiliation with his department. Though I have been advised that he is an active participant in the Psychoanalysis and the Humanities seminars, when he thought of writing a proposal for a training program in psychoanalysis for history graduate students, he decided against it because of the cost and a climate among historians that he perceived as too hostile. He fears that it is probably too dangerous to the career of a young historian to openly be identified with psychoanalysis. He is not comfortable with the term psychohistory, which is also true of Erik Erikson, John Demos, and some others who have made great contributions. Gay commented to me that John Demos and he never really discussed psychohistory even while having amiable relations as colleagues. In the same department, David B. Davis and Jonathan Spence also have enough interest in psychoanalysis applied to society to sometimes attend the Gardiner/Kanzer Seminars, yet there seems to be no cohesive sense among the historians as a psychohistorical group.

As an emeritus professor Peter Gay is now applying his considerable talents to establishing the Cullman think tank at New York Public Library. As in the case of Lifton, whose excellent center we have brought to our readers’ attention in these pages, the special insights that he brings from his psychoanalytic perspective, will not be highlighted as psychohistory. There is much to be said for an indirect approach — mainly, that there is less resistance to overcome. Yet clearly, because of the institution-building at UCLA, the prospects for the long term flowering in history departments of psychohistory in California is better than in Connecticut, from which some of the Yale innovators have dispersed. I will leave it to the reader to decide if these better prospects in Los Angeles than New Haven are more a function of

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different approaches or primarily the openness of California to all sorts of innovations and the relative conservatism of the history faculty at one of the country’s oldest and finest universities.

It should be noted that Yale University Press should not be confused with the departments at Yale. There, Gladys Topkis, who participates in the Psychoanalysis and the Humanities seminars, has sought out and built an outstanding psychoanalytic academic list from among mostly non-Yale authors. Albert J. Solnit, Sterling Professor Emeritus of Pediatrics and Psychiatry, is current coordinator of the seminars and Managing Editor of The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child series which is published by the Yale University Press. It should be noted that this energetic, 78-year-old practicing psychoanalyst and attending physician at Yale Hospital, is still also Commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services — even if the likelihood is that his replacement will not be a psychiatrist — and certainly not an analyst. However, in listening to him discuss the need for more applied psychoanalysis at a conference in New York last April, I had no sense that he had an awareness of the work being published in most of the explicitly psychohistorical journals.

A concluding question is, do professors who are psychoanalysts have the best of two worlds or are they torn in two directions without enough time for either? Though in the end each individual must ultimately answer this question, I suspect the answer is usually that they have the best of both worlds. After all, they can regulate how much time is devoted to a psychoanalytic practice, and as college professors they have far more control over the use of their own time than do the members in most professions. Furthermore, in analysis, analysands become fully aware of just how much we shape our own lives and how we are free to make choices. And most importantly, they have a method of inquiry which offers special insights to personal, interpersonal, societal, and historical issues. They have the rewards of a truly unique education.

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